Recent Comments

Search Engine Optimization is first and foremost about content. Google and other search engines will do their best to index your content so that when people search for information you provide they can find you. The search engines succeed when they can make the closest match between what a user is searching for and the content that will serve them best.

This is why you always here people talking about "keywords." You want to use the words in your posts and pages that your target audience is most likely to use when searching for the type of content you provide. Of course if your information isn't useful, keywords won't matter; you still need to provide content that serves the needs of your visitors.

Once you conquer the content, you can help the search engines by formatting it in a way that makes it easier for them to identify what the key topics are on a page. This is done by using unique page titles and descriptions in your header and by using keywords in your text and headers. Formatting your pages using W3C valid semantic HTML helps as well. I have more detailed information about this on my SEO Tips page.

SEO Plug-ins

Once you understand the basics of on-site SEO you will find that plug-ins offer a huge advantage. They make it easier to customize page titles, descriptions and other data. While many people use All-in-One SEO, I prefer Headspace 2. This plug-in makes it very easy to customize SEO related elements either sitewide or by category and other parameters. In many cases you can simply configure your default settings then leave things as they are. But HeadSpace 2 also gives you the option to customize things on a per page/post basis, providing you with convenient fields for customizing titles descriptions or other elements.

This is also useful for social media. For example, if you or someone else, posts a link on Facebook, the little blurb that shows up along with it is actually the content from the description field. If you want to add useful information when sharing links it helps to customize this so that the blurb describes your post rather than your site.